HP G6 (i5) - Ubuntu 11.10 install

So my wife bought a new laptop as above and wanted Ubuntu installed. Wow what a task on this computer. All 4 primary partitions were alread used (windows, windows recovery file, HP bios tools, HP full image of the drive recovery tools). So first you have to eliminate one. I deleted the windows recovery partition with gParted. Then I merged or grew the windows boot partition into the newly unalocated partition.

Next, I found that the LiveCD would boot to a blank screen, so I had to edit the the kernel boot line to include the "nomodeset" command and the install went fine (wrong resolution though).

After the install I found that no matter what, the LCD was black after boot. After days of googleing I found the solution below.

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

 

And change the option row GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" as follow:   

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor splash"

 

Then update Grub installation with the command:

sudo update-grub

 

and restart the notebook.

Probem solved, but with a minor quirk or two... If you close the loptop lid, the screen will be black again when you open it. All you have to do is use the keyboard function that raises the brightness and it's back to normal. It seems that closing the lid turns the screen brightness to completely off.

Next, becareful not to hit the button that turns off the wireless. It turns off the radio and it won't come back on unless you reboot.

That's it, everything else works fine. If you use this information to help you with YOUR install and it works that's great. Remember this is not intended to be a guide but it's actually notes for me to use if I need to do a reinstall.